Cops and trust in East New York

Way out near the end of the 3 line, at the Hope Christian Center on the corner of Pennsylvania and New Lots Aves., 15 cops sat stiffly on little folding chairs in the bank branch turned church, waiting to hear what 20 black and Hispanic boys and men with them in the bare third-floor meeting room would have to say.

The officers, including six sergeants newly arrived in the 75th Precinct, had been sent there by Inspector Michael LiPetri , the precinct commander, for a meeting of cops of all ranks with the people they're charged with serving and protecting.

"I call it a roundtable," LiPetri told me, saying that with "the events of the past year and a half, we've taken a step back. We're trying to figure out how to improve the relationship," and get more cops — not just commanding and community affairs officers — to talk with the people they serve .

Rev. Tyrone Stevenson, the founder of Hope Christian Center who grew up cattycorner from where the church stands now, told me that the roundtables sprang from an initial meeting of East Brooklyn Congregations, including his, with LiPetri after the inspector arrived at the precinct about 15 months ago. There, ministers shared detailed concerns about local crime.

Tuesday evening, cops and civilians sat down in groups of two and three to introduce themselves, and talk. I sat first with two teenage boys, all slouched shoulders and closed mouths, as a young white cop, who looked barely older than them, tried to engage. "What do you guys like to do?"

Pressing through their near silence, the cop kept sharing little bits about himself and then asking the teens started opening up, with one asking, in something below a whisper, for advice from the cop, a fellow older brother , on how to watch out for sisters who don't necessarily want to be watched out for.

Since I seemed to be inhibiting that conversation, I moved on to sit in with Inskip Miller, a barrel-chested 50-year-old retired NYPD sergeant with a shock white beard and Andrew Morgan, 54, who grew up as a cop's son in Canarsie, with his one of the first three black families there. They were talking with Sashanna Wynter, who'd just made sergeant, been assigned to the 75th and moved to Canarsie, to be close to the place she'd be serving. They were deep into a talk about what the job was like now, how it feels to be a female cop in the street and about diversity in the Department, with her mentioning the mentor who drew her in as a black woman.

Finally, the men got down to brass tacks: "Do you have a church here yet?"

After half an hour, things wrapped up with some numbers exchanged and some good will established.

While rebuilding trust is key, "the main challenge is unfortunately gun violence," said LiPetri, who's upped the number of intelligence officers from two to six. "There are multiple hot spots and that's the tough part of the 75," where stops have plummeted and the 72 shooting victims through September are notably up from 51 at the same point last year.

He didn't put it this way, but one benefit of opening up channels with the community may be that — with cops no longer wholesale stopping and searching young men — it becomes that much more important from a policing perspective to identify and distinguish the handful of mostly young men driving gun violence, who are also much more likely to become victims of it, from the broader neighborhood they live in.

About 60% of shootings so far this year have involved a crew or gang member, LiPetri said . The roundtable's mirror image might be Operation Ceasefire, in which representatives of crews and gangs member are summoned to meet with police, in a neutral location, and first offered help with any issues they may have and then warned, and told to warn the rest of their sets, that "if the violence doesn't stop we're going to go the other way and use all our tools" to put them away.

But, LiPetri said, "it can't always be about enforcement to suppress violence; there has to be other aspects of it."

Of course, police-community meetings aren't new. Necessarily, they aren't huge, or scalable. Which might be the point — that there's no shortcut to building trust.

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Stevenson, pointing to Baltimore's post-Freddie Gray crime spike, said "it's going to get worse there, because you have two factions that don't talk. Don't talk! God forbid, the same thing could happen here, now, in East New York."

If it did, he said, "LiPetri knows that he can call on our churches and we're going to get the facts and he knows that if something's wrong we're going to bring it to him. And I think that's necessary."

He went on: "I hate the picture being painted that our communities, communities of color, were waiting for white people to come fix our issues. I hate it. And this is so simple."

It is. The question is what happens outside the churches, after the meetings.

Some of the sergeants at the last roundtable showed up later at a family picnic at St. Paul's church, said Morgan, who called cops coming to the church "a place to start — and every journey needs a first step."